FanGraphs Glossary: The Winter Cleaning

As pointed out on Twitter today, there’s some good news for baseball fans today: the wait until Spring Training is officially half over. The middle of February is looking closer and closer now that January is a few days away, so before we know it, pitchers and catchers will begin their yearly migration down to the warmer climes. Our long, dark teatime of the soul is all but over.

But this is bittersweet news. Yes, the wait until Spring Training is almost over, but the coming month and a half is typically the slowest, most painful time of the offseason. The Winter Meetings have passed and baseball news has slowed down to a crawl, so there isn’t much to keep us baseball-philes content. This January promises to be more eventful than most, considering Prince Fielder is still on the market and there are multiple potential trades that may happen, but I’m not about to set my expectations too high.

Since things can get so slow this month, this is typically the time of the year when I update and re-edit the Sabermetric Library — a mid-winter cleaning, if you will. I haven’t begun dusting out the cobwebs yet, though, as I’d love to get input on what people would like to see this time around. And so…

  • Are these any pages in the Library you think badly need an edit? Is there anything you’d like to see added to any particular page?
  • Are there any new pages or articles you’d like to see added to the Library?
  • Any new links that I should be sure to include in the Library?

In short, if you have any ideas on how to improve the glossary here at FanGraphs and to make it more useful, please share! I’ll be spending the next month or so making edits and changes, and I welcome any ideas.





Piper was the editor-in-chief of DRaysBay and the keeper of the FanGraphs Library.

28 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
MauerPower
12 years ago

More of a question than anything. In the SIERA page it says SIERA isn’t the end all be all type stat and talks about how FIP and xFIP still have their uses. It also says how you should be balanced when using them. What type of advantages does FIP/xFIP have over SIERA?